Chapter 6
Cognitive
Development in
Infancy
Cognitive
Development
in Infancy
Piaget's Theory
of Infant
Development
Learning and
Remembering
Individual
Differences
in Intelligence
Black Hawk College Chapter 6
Language
Development
2
Piaget's Theory
of Infant
Development
The Stage of
Sensorimotor
Development
Substages
Object
Permanence
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Evaluating
Piaget's
Theory
3
Piaget’s Theory of Infant
Development
• Piaget believed that the child passes through a series of stages of
thought from infancy to adolescence.
• Passage through the stages results from biological pressure to adapt
to the environment (through assimilation and accommodation) and to
organize structures of thinking.
• The stages are qualitatively different from one another; the way that
children reason at one stage is different from the way they reason at
another stage.
• Children have schemes (cognitive structures that help individuals’
organize and understand their experiences) from birth.
• Schemes change with age.
• As children grow older and gain more experience, they shift from using
physically-based schemes to mentally-based schemes.
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The Stage of Sensorimotor
Development
• According to Piaget, this stage lasts from birth
to about 2 years of age.
• Mental development is characterized by
considerable progression in the infant’s ability
to organize and coordinate sensations with
physical movements and actions.
• Children progress from having little more than
reflexive patterns to work with to complex
sensorimotor patterns and a primitive system
of symbols.
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Substages
•
•
•
•
•
Simple reflexes
First habits and primary circular reactions
Secondary circular reactions
Coordination of secondary circular reactions
Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and
curiosity
• Internalization of schemes
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Simple Reflexes
• Stage corresponds to the first month after
birth.
• The basic means of coordinating sensation
and action is through reflexive behaviors.
• The infant develops an ability to produce
behaviors that resemble reflexes in the
absence of obvious reflexive stimuli (e.g.,
sucking upon simply seeing a bottle).
• This is evidence that the infant is initiating
action and is actively structuring experiences
in the first month of life.
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First Habits and Primary
Circular Reactions
• This stage develops between 1-4 months of age.
• Infants’ reflexes evolve into adaptive schemes
that are more refined and coordinated.
• A habit is a scheme based on a simple reflex that
has become completely separated from its
eliciting stimulus.
• A primary circular reaction is a scheme based on
the infant’s attempt to reproduce an interesting or
pleasurable event that initially occurred by
chance.
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Secondary Circular
Reactions
• This stage develops between 4-8 months of
age.
• The infant becomes more object-oriented or
focused on the world, moving beyond
preoccupation with the self in sensorimotor
interactions.
• The infant imitates some simple actions and
physical gestures of others, but only those he
can already produce.
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Coordination of Secondary
Circular Reactions
• This stage develops between 8-12 months of age.
• Several significant changes take place that involve
the coordination of schemes and intentionality.
• Infants readily combine and recombine previously
learned schemes in a coordinated way.
• Actions are even more outwardly directed.
• Related to their coordination is the presence of
intentionality: the separation of means and goals
in accomplishing simple feats.
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Tertiary Circular Reactions,
Novelty, and Curiosity
• This stage develops between 12-18 months of age.
• Infants become intrigued by the variety of properties
that objects possess and by the many things they can
make happen to objects.
• Tertiary circular reactions are schemes in which the
infant purposely explores new possibilities with
objects, continually changing what is done to them
and exploring the results.
• Piaget believed this marks the developmental starting
point for curiosity and interest in novelty.
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Internalization of Schemes
• This stage develops between 18-24 months.
• The infant’s mental functioning shifts from a purely
sensorimotor plane to a symbolic plane.
• The infant develops the ability to use primitive
symbols (internalized sensory images or words that
represent events).
• Primitive symbols permit infant to think about concrete
events without directly acting out or perceiving them.
• Symbols also allow the infant to manipulate and
transform the represented events in simple ways.
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Object Permanence
• Object permanence is the
Piagetian term for
understanding that objects
and events continue to exist,
even when they cannot
directly be seen, heard, or
touched.
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Evaluating Piaget’s
Sensorimotor Stage
• Piaget opened up a whole new way of looking at
infants by describing how their main task is to
coordinate their sensory impression with their
motor activity.
• The infant’s cognitive world is not nearly as neatly
packaged as Piaget portrayed it, and some of his
explanations for the cause of change are debated.
• Many of today’s researchers believe that Piaget
wasn’t specific enough about how infants learn
about their world and that infants are far more
competent than Piaget envisioned.
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New Perspectives on Infant
Development
• Perceptual Development
• Conceptual Development
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Perceptual Development
• A number of theorists believe that infants’ perceptual
abilities are highly developed very early in development.
• Studies have shown that infants as young as 4 months
old have intermodal perception—the ability to coordinate
information from two or more sensory modalities.
• Other research has indicated that 4-month-olds expect
objects to be substantial and permanent.
• Researchers now believe that infants see objects as
bounded, unitary, solid, and separate, possibly at birth or
shortly thereafter.
• Young infants have much to learn, but the world appears
both stable and orderly to them, thus capable of being
conceptualized.
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Conceptual Development
• Piaget constructed his view of infancy mainly by
observing his own children as few laboratory
techniques were available at the time.
• Researchers have since then devised ways to assess
whether or not infants are thinking.
• These methods have led to findings that indicate that
infants have more sophisticated perceptual abilities
and can begin to think earlier than Piaget envisioned.
• Researchers believe humans are either born with or
acquire these abilities early in their development.
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Learning and
Remembering
Conditioning
Habituation and
Dishabituation
Imitation
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Memory
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Conditioning
• Both classical and operant conditioning have
been demonstrated to occur in infants.
• If an infant’s behavior is followed by a
rewarding stimulus, the behavior is likely to
recur.
• Operant conditioning has been helpful to
researchers in their efforts to determine what
infants perceive.
• Studies have demonstrated that infants can
retain information from the experience of
being conditioned.
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Habituation and
Dishabituation
• Habituation is the process by which infants become
uninterested in a stimulus and respond less to it after it is
repeatedly presented to them.
• Dishabituation is an infant’s renewed interest in a stimulus.
• Newborns habituate in virtually every stimulus modality, but
habituation grows more acute over first 3 months.
• Habituation can be used to tell us much about infants’
perception, such as the extent to which they can see, hear,
smell, taste, and experience touch.
• Habituation can tell us whether infants recognize something
they have previously experienced.
• A knowledge of habituation and dishabituation can benefit
parent-infant interactions.
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Imitation
• Andrew Meltzoff believes infants’ imitative abilities to
be biologically based because they can imitate a
facial expression within the first few days after birth.
• This occurs before they’ve had the opportunity to
observe social agents in their environment or the
behaviors they have been observed to imitate.
• Meltzoff also believes infant imitation involves
flexibility, adaptability, and intermodal perception.
• Not all experts accept Meltzoff’s conclusions and
believe the babies were automatically responding to
a stimulus.
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Deferred Imitation
• Deferred imitation is imitation which occurs
after a time delay of hours or days.
• Meltzoff found that 9-month-old infants could
imitate actions that they had seen performed
24 hours earlier.
• Piaget believed that deferred imitation doesn’t
occur until about 18 months of age.
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Memory
• Implicit memory involves
retention of a perceptual-motor
variety that is involved in
conditioning tasks.
• Explicit memory is the ability to
consciously recall the past.
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Memory in Infancy
• Memory is a central feature of cognitive development that
involves the retention of information over time.
• Some argue that infants as young as 2-6 months can
remember some experiences through 1½-2 years of age.
• Critics of these findings argue that they fail to distinguish
between implicit memory and explicit memory.
• Most researchers don’t find that explicit memory occurs
until the second half of the first year.
• Most adults cannot remember anything from the first 3
years of life, a phenomenon referred to as infant amnesia.
• One explanation of infant amnesia focuses on the
maturation of the brain, especially in the frontal lobes,
which occur after infancy.
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Individual
Differences in
Intelligence
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Individual Differences in
Intelligence
• Individual differences in infant cognitive development
have been studied primarily through the use of
developmental scales or infant intelligence tests.
• It is advantageous to know whether an infant is
advancing at a slow, normal, or advanced pace of
development.
• Infant developmental scales differ from those used to
assess older children in that they are necessarily less
verbal, contain more perceptual motor items, and
include measures of social interaction.
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Arnold Gesell
• Gesell is the most important early contributor to the
developmental testing of infants.
• He developed a measure used as a clinical tool to help
sort out potentially normal babies from abnormal ones.
• The Gesell test was widely used years ago, and is still
used by pediatricians to assess normal and abnormal
infants.
• The current version of the Gesell test has 4 categories of
behavior: motor, language, adaptive, personal-social.
• Results yield an infant’s developmental quotient (DQ)—
an overall developmental score that combines subscores
in the four categories.
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The Bayley Scales of Infant
Development
• These scales are widely used in the assessment of
infant development.
• The current version has 3 components: a mental
scale, a motor scale, and an infant behavior profile.
• It includes assessment of the following:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Auditory and visual attention to stimuli
Manipulation, such as shaking a rattle
Examiner interaction, such as babbling and imitation
Relation with toys, such as banging spoons together
Memory involved in object permanence
Goal-directed behavior that involves persistence
Ability to follow directions and knowledge of objects’ names
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The Fagan Test of Infant
Intelligence
• The Fagan test is becoming increasingly popular.
• It focuses on the infant’s ability to process information
in such ways as:
–
–
–
–
encoding the attributes of objects
detecting similarities and differences between objects
forming mental representations
retrieving those representations
• The Fagan test uses the amount of time babies look
at a new object compared with how long they look at
a familiar object to estimate their intelligence.
• This test elicits similar performances from infants in
different cultures and is correlated with measures of
intelligence in older children.
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Effectiveness of Infant
Intelligence Tests
• Tests of infant intelligence have been valuable in assessing the
effects of malnutrition, drugs, maternal deprivation, and
environmental stimulation on infant development.
• They have, however, been met with mixed results in predicting
later intelligence on a global scale.
• Specific aspects of infant intelligence are related to specific
aspects of childhood intelligence, as in the areas of language
and perceptual motor skills.
• Evidence is accumulating that measures of habituation and
dishabituation predict intelligence in childhood with regard to
efficiency of information processing.
• It is important that we turn our attention to identifying ways in
which cognition is both continuous and discontinuous in its
development.
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Language
Development
Defining
Language
How
Language
Develops
Biological
Influences
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Behavioral
and
Environmental
Influences
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Defining Language
• Language is a form of communication,
whether spoken, written, or signed, that is
based on a system of symbols.
• All human languages have some common
characteristics such as infinite generativity
and organizational rules.
• Infinite generativity is the ability to produce an
endless number of meaningful sentences
using a finite set of words and rules.
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How Language Develops
• First few months of life - infants startle to sharp noises
• 3-6 months - begin to show an interest in sounds,
respond to voices
• 6-9 months - babbling begins (goo-goo) due to
biological maturation; infants also begin to understand
their first words
• Early communication is in the form of pragmatics to get
attention:
– making or breaking eye contact
– vocalizing sounds
– performing manual actions such as pointing
• 10-15 months - the infant utters its first word
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The First Words
• A child’s first words include those that name
– Important people (dada)
-Body parts (eye)
– Familiar animals (kitty)
-Clothes (hat)
– Vehicles (car)
-Household items (keys)
– Toys (ball)
-Greeting terms (bye)
– Food (milk)
• These were the first words of babies 50 years ago and they are the
first words of babies today.
• One theory as to the meaning of these one-word utterances is that
they stand for an entire sentence in the infant’s mind.
• The holophrase hypothesis states that a single word can be used to
imply a complete sentence, and that infants’ first words
characteristically are holophrastic.
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The Two-Word Stage
• At 18-24 months, children begin to utter two-word
statements.
• They quickly grasp the importance of expressing concepts
and the role that language plays in communicating.
• To convey meaning, the child relies heavily on gesture,
tone, and context.
• Two-word sentences may omit many parts of speech;
they are remarkably succinct in conveying many
messages.
• Telegraphic speech is the use of short and precise words
to communicate. Young children’s two- and three-word
utterances are characteristically telegraphic.
• In every language, a child’s first combinations of words
have this economical quality.
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Meanings Expressed in
Children’s Two-Word Utterances
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Identification: “See doggie”
Location: “Book there”
Repetition: “More milk”
Nonexistence: “All gone thing”
Negation: “Not wolf”
Possession: “My doggy”
Attribution: “Big car”
Agent-action: “Mama walk”
Action-direct object: “Hit you”
Action-indirect object: “Give Papa”
Action-instrument: “Cut knife”
Question: “Where ball?”
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Biological Influences
• The strongest evidence for the biological
basis of language is that children all over the
world reach language milestones at about the
same time developmentally, and in about the
same order.
• Occurs despite vast variation in the language
input they receive (in some cultures, adults
do not talk to children under 1 year).
• There is also no other convincing way to
explain how quickly children learn language
than through biological foundations.
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Biological Evolution
• In evolutionary time, language is a very recent acquisition.
• Many experts believe that biological evolution shaped
humans into linguistic creatures.
• The brain, nervous system, and vocal apparatus of our
predecessors changed over hundreds of thousands of
years.
• Physically equipped to do so, Homo sapiens went beyond
grunting and shrieking to develop abstract speech.
• Language clearly gave humans an enormous edge over
other animals and increased the chances of survival.
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Biological Prewiring
• Linguist Noam Chomsky believes humans are biologically
prewired to learn language at a certain time, in a certain
way.
• He states children are born with a language acquisition
device (LAD)—a biological endowment that enables them
to detect certain language categories, such as phonology,
syntax, and semantics.
• The LAD is a theoretical construct that flows from evidence
about the biological basis of language.
• Supporters of this concept cite
– the uniformity of language milestones across languages and
cultures
– biological substrates for language
– evidence that children create language even in the absence of wellformed input (e.g., deaf
children)
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Behavioral and
Environmental Influences
• Behaviorists view language as just another behavior
involving chains of responses or imitation.
• However, many of the sentences we produce are novel.
• The behavioral mechanisms of reinforcement and
imitation cannot completely explain this.
• Parents have been observed to occasionally smile and
praise their children for sentences they like, including
sentences that are ungrammatical.
• Another criticism is that language is highly structured and
rule driven, yet behavior theory would predict that vast
individual differences should appear to each child’s
unique learning history.
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The Importance of the
Environment
• We do not learn language in a social vacuum; most
children are bathed in language from a very early age.
• We need this exposure to language to acquire competent
language skills.
• Most language experts today believe children from a
variety of cultures acquire their native language without
explicit teaching and, in some cases, without apparent
encouragement.
• Although there appear to be very few aids necessary for
learning language, studies have shown differences in
language development due to environmental
circumstances such as socioeconomic status.
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Other Environmental
Influences
• Infant-directed speech is the type of speech often used by
parents and other adults when they talk to babies. It has a
higher than normal pitch and involves the use of simple
words and sentences.
• It has the important functions of capturing the infant’s
attention and maintaining communication.
• Recasting is rephrasing something the child has said in a
different way, perhaps turning it into a question.
• It works to let the child initially indicate an interest and
then proceed to elaborate that interest—commenting,
demonstrating, and explaining improve communication
and help language Black
acquisition.
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Other Environmental
Influences (con’t)
• Echoing is repeating what a child says, especially if it
is an incomplete phrase or sentence.
• Expanding is restating, in a linguistically sophisticated
form, what a child has said.
• Labeling is identifying the names of objects.
• These strategies are used naturally and in
meaningful conversations.
• Parents do not (and should not) deliberately teach
their children to talk.
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